Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today after alleged DDoS attack

Wikipedia editors have agreed to phase out and then block links to Archive. Today, a web archiving service that they say has been referenced more than 695,000 times across the encyclopedia.

Archive. Today, which also appears under multiple related domains such as Archive. It is an archive.ph — is commonly used to view pages that are difficult to access, including content hidden behind paywalls. For that reason, it has also been frequently used in Wikipedia citations.

But according to the on-wiki discussion page about the matter, editors reached "consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today" and, when feasible, add it to the spam bblocklist while also removing existing links to the service. Ars Technica was first to report the decision.

The same discussion notes that Archive. Today was blocked once before in 2013 and later removed from the blocklist in 2016 — meaning this is a reversal of that earlier decision.

So why the change now? Editors argued that "Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack." They also cited claims that "evidence has been presented," suggesting that Archive. Today's operators may have modified the contents of some archived pages, raising questions about their reliability as a reference source.

The alleged distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) activity centres on blogger Jani Patokallio. Patokallio wrote that starting on January 11, people who opened the archive site's CAPTCHA page were unknowingly served and executed JavaScript that sent search requests to his Gyrovague blog. Patokallio described the behaviour as an apparent attempt to get his attention and potentially increase his hosting costs by generating artificial traffic.

Patokallio has previously examined Archive, today as a project. In a 2023 blog post, he described the site's ownership as "an opaque mystery." Although he said he could not identify a confirmed owner, he suggested it was likely "a one-person labourer of love," run by "a Russian of considerable talent" with access to Europe.

More recently, Patokallio said the webmaster behind Archi ve. Today, I contacted him and asked that he remove his post for "two or three months." Patokallio shared emails in which the webmaster complained that journalists at mainstream outlets — including Heise and The Verge — had selectively excerpted his post, then built broader narratives from it, citing his blog as the main source before recycling citations among themselves.

"I do not mind the post," the webmaster wrote, according to the emails Patokallio published, but added that media coverage was "cherry-picking" a few phrases and producing "a shitty result" for a larger audience. Patokallio said that after he declined to take the post down, the webmaster replied with what he characterised as "an increasingly unhinged series of threats."

Wikipedia editors also pointed to examples of Archive. Today, the snapshots that appeared to have been altered to insert Patokallio's name, which fed into the view that the service may no longer be a dependable archival record. That concern — alongside the alleged JavaScript-based traffic activity — contributed to the push to stop using Archive. Today's links across the site.

Wikipedia's updated guidance calls on editors to remove Archive. today and related links and, where possible, replace them with the source URLs or alternative archival options such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Meanwhile, on a blog linked from Archive. Today, the apparent owner argued that the service's value to Wikipedia was "not about paywalls," but rather "the ability to offload copyright issues." In later remarks, the writer suggested things had gone "pretty well" and said they would "scale down the 'DDoS.'"

They also aimed for news coverage of the controversy, writing: "Why didn't you write about such events earlier, folks of the tabloids?" The post continued: "I don't expect you to write anything good, because then who would read you, but there were plenty of dramas, wasn't there? Because there was no Jani to nudge you?"